The GOP Speaks

Not the GOP that you're used to hearing--the Beltway GOP led by Michael Steele, Congressional leadership, and the top 2012 contenders--but the GOP that lives out in the rest of America: the state and local leaders that make up the Republican Party across the U.S.

In an attempt to get past the top-level messaging of DC-based party operatives, Conor Friedersdorf of The American Scene has been emailing a questionnaire to those who hold official rank as state GOP chairs, county GOP chairs, county vice-chairs, and members of county executive committees. He's posting the responses he gets, verbatim, at a new blog that's been aptly named The GOP Speaks.

Call it a pointillist pulse of the greater GOP.


There are few threads that tie the opinions together, the three most pronounced being that President Obama is driving the country into socialism, that individual freedoms are being taken away and the Constitution ignored, and that the media can't be trusted.

Conor's questionnaire asks six questions germane to the national discussion about the party's present and future--from what its focus should be in the minority, to the role of talk radio hosts, to the right's traditional alliances, to the most worrisome thing about Obama's tenure, to allegations of racism.

If the responses are less than unified, they are, at the very least, instructive--reactions not only to Obama and his liberal sensibilities, but to the Republican Party itself and current leaders.